As at this time of writing, Graphene 1.7 has been sent up the pipe to the WordPress.org Theme Repository. Here’s what you should know before you upgrade.

Note though that it might take anywhere from several hours to several weeks before the theme is published on the repository, as each theme is reviewed by the WordPress Theme Review Team before they are made live. In the mean time, let’s see what’s coming to your WordPress-powered site with Graphene 1.7, and what to look out for.

What’s new

This release is mainly for tidying up and improving existing features, and so few completely new major features are included. However, you may find some of the improvements pretty substantial.

The list of improvements include:

  • the social media icons in the top bar can now be reordered via a drag & drop interface
  • posts from categories that are displayed in the slider can now be excluded from all other posts listing, preventing duplicate posts
  • the slider can now display random posts from the selected categories
  • added en_US translation file for American English locale, so you can finally have your site display license instead of licence
  • manual excerpt for video post formats will now be displayed as the video’s caption at the side
  • a couple of new colour presets have been added to the colour options, along with a few new colour options
  • improved 404 Not Found automated search to accommodated URLs with trailing slash
  • JS scripts in the Graphene Options pages have been refactored so that servers can now minify and combine them, and browsers can now cache them
  • the default widgets in the sidebar have been replaced with a notice saying that you have no widgets placed in that particular widget area

There are also a few new language translations addition. These are:

  • Greek (el), by nikos Karadimas
  • Kurdish Sorani (ckb), by Hamid Qamishi
  • Romanian (ro_RO), by Alexander Ovsov

Remember to check out the video tutorial I created some time ago on how you can use these translations for your own site.

Squashed bugs

Pound for pound, insects contain more protein than steak. They’re perfect survival food. But they’re just annoying when they creep into softwares.

This release fixed four bugs that have been reported, some of which are edge cases where you might not even notice them. But the fact that there are few bugs reported does suggest the overall stability of the theme, and that most of the bugs have already been addressed in previous maintenance releases.

You can see the full list of bugfixes in the theme’s changelog.

What to watch out for

Not many, this time. Just two, perhaps.

The default language for a vanilla WordPress install is American English (en_US). If you want to use the British English locale, just change the value for WP_LANG in the wp-config.php file in your WordPress root folder to en_GB.

And for those who are using the Arabic translation of the theme, the language code for Arabic has been changed from ar_AR to just ar. This is so that the theme is using the same language code for Arabic as with the Arabic translation for WordPress itself. So make sure you change the language code in your wp-config.php file to reflect this change.

Changelog

The changes listed in this post are just the highlights of this release, and do not reflect the full set of changes.

For the full changelog, head over to the theme’s demo site.

Credits

The Graphene theme is a community effort, and a lot of people have contributed to its development.

I would like to express my gratitude especially to the translators and beta testers, whose feedbacks and bug reports have been invaluable.

Also thanks to Jeffrey Tummers for contributing codes and for co-developing the theme.

And as usual, the Support Forum moderators and volunteers, particularly Josh Lobe, Kenneth J. Odle, and Prasanna. You guys have been a huge help, and I’m sure a huge number of the theme’s users feel the same way.